Mel Gibson's latest hero: a rapist who hunted Indians for fun

The true-life pioneer behind the new Mel Gibson action film has been revealed to be not so much the stuff of legend as of law courts. The summer action flick The Patriot takes its inspiration from the exploits of a certain Francis Marion, who took on the full might of the British army during the American War of Independence. But when he wasn't forging the land of the free, it seems that Marion was slaughtering Indians for fun and regularly raping his female slaves. Unsurprisingly, The Patriot script elected to gloss over this aspect of its protagonist's life.

Speaking to the Daily Express, historian Christopher Hibbert claims that Marion, also known as 'the Swamp Fox', was "very active in the persecution of the Cherokee Indians and not at all the sort of chap who should be celebrated as a hero. The truth is that people like Marion committed atrocities as bad, if not worse, than those perpetrated by the British."

In The Patriot (which stars Mel Gibson in the lead role), the Swamp Fox is renamed Benjamin Martin. An anonymous source from Sony Pictures admits that the film was originally conceived as a factual biography, until the makers got wind of Marion's true history: "They couldn't go ahead once historians had given them chapter and verse on the Swamp Fox, so they had to change his name."

This controversy is not the first to dog the film. Two months ago it was threatened by the US censors with a prohibitive certificate for a scene which featured two children slaughtering a British soldier.

The Patriot is not the first film to airbrush the biography of its true-life subject. Heinrich Harrer, the Zen-like seeker played by Brad Pitt in Seven Years in Tibet, for instance, was subsequently revealed to have been a Nazi. Most notorious of all, perhaps, was Burt Lancaster's soulful portrayal of the incarcerated bird-lover Robert Stroud in Birdman of Alcatraz. The film's release provoked mass demands for Stroud to be given his freedom, but the movie neglecting to mention that Stroud had fatally stabbed a man in the prison canteen, and juggled a love of ornithology with a deep fascination with child pornography.